30th August 2021

Well, was that the noisiest bank holiday on record? I don’t mean the aeroplanes; there were a lot fewer of them than normal. I don’t even mean the cars, though there were a lot on the roads. I mean the music. The loud music. The loud music, with the thudding base. Wherever people gathered, they seemed to want to turn up the volume.

I was not alone in noticing how loud this weekend became.

This from twitter:

That music festival in Victoria Park is loud. I’m near Queensbridge Road and I’m hearing the music reflecting off the buildings that are facing towards Victoria Park. This is much louder than in the past.

And this:

Currently in Leigh on Sea in the harbour area and there is one bar pumping out bass heavy dance music totally killing the calm vibe of this otherwise chilled spot. Fiddles and or sea shanties would be more appropriate here.

We missed each other during lockdown. Perhaps the music was just a symbol of the release people felt. It tied in with summer shorts, shopping sprees, flirting, pubbing, clubbing. It was the sound of freedom. It was the frenetic urge to get lost in sound to celebrate the collapse of the Berlin Wall of Covid restrictions.

I, too, wanted to celebrate. That’s why I was out and about. But I spent my time dodging the incessant beat of Central London. The thudding sound of the base, the same low-frequency noise which makes aircraft, wind turbines and freight trains so disturbing to some people, seemed to be celebrated by countless others.

In their research (1) in 2008 Blesser and Salter found:

‘when a culture accepts loudness as being a legitimate right in recreational sound venues, that acceptance tends to legitimise all forms of noise pollution'.

They continued:

As a culture with advancing sonic tools and amplification, there are increasing opportunities to be immersed in destructively loud sound fields. We believe that acceptance of loudness in entertainment then carries over to a tolerance of disruptive noise from airplanes, jackhammers, powered garden equipment, and so on. Loudness becomes the cultural norm.’

Could it be that loudness has become the cultural norm in the UK?

That was certainly my experience in London over the weekend. After a late breakfast with a friend in a wonderfully quiet, muzac-free Wetherpoons (Arise Sir Tim) in Farringdon, I came across the March for Animals. It’s a cause I thoroughly approve of so decided to join it as it moved off. But I only got as far Fleet Street before the noise of the rythmic drumming forced me to retreat to the peace and quiet of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The drums were so loud some children had their fingers in their ears (Sign them up as the next generation of anti-noise campaigners!). And yet a tweet described the event as ‘Waiting at the start of #AnimalRebellion yesterday. Brilliant day, samba bands kept the energy high, very moving speeches, all peaceful and joyous’. Loudness has become the cultural norm?

In Central London you have to search to get away from it. Fancy a coffee? Without muzac? Your cappuccino challenge. The al fresco dining hasn’t helped matters. The streets have become noisier, with loud music from the restaurants pumped out incessantly. My advice: go to Soho before 5pm when cars are allowed. The tables are noisier than the traffic. But many people like the loud evening ambience. Loudness has become the cultural norm?

I scurried back through Leicester Square to the Underground. It was a cacophony of noise. Music blaring out of the shops, competing with buskers and their amplified sounds. I know what the Taliban would have done. I’m not suggesting that as the final solution.

What I am saying is that, if loudness has become the cultural norm at least for part of the population, it makes finding solutions to the very real noise problems which do exist more complex.

(1), Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Slater, The unexamined rewards for excessive loudness (2008)

John Stewart

By Josh Sims

Written for the BBC 17th June 2020

With fewer people on the streets, cars on the roads, businesses closed and flights grounded, the daily noise that fills our lives has reduced. Can we hope to keep the hubbub down?

“Silence is part of our everyday life,” says Paavo Virkkunen, chief executive of the Finnish tourist board, Visit Finland, which almost a decade ago launched an acclaimed and on-going campaign suggesting that peace and quiet was one of the best reasons to visit the country. “Silence is one of those values you need to help you separate the essentials from the non-essentials of life. And I think it has influenced why tourists come here – because silence is a resource you can’t find everywhere in the world.”

Or, at least, it wasn’t. With the advent of the Covid-19 lockdown – and the concomitant reduction in crowds, road and air traffic – many places are now bathed in an unusual quiet. The Earth itself is even quieter: the Royal Observatory of Belgium has reported a reduction in seismic noise – the ambient hum of vibrations that travel through the planet’s crust – as a result of reduced human activity. “When lockdown ends I’ll miss the extra silence we’ve had,” says Virkkunen.

For those of us not lucky enough to live amid tranquil surroundings in Finland, we may be in for a shock when we return to life in the outside world again and the noise inevitably returns. “It’s change that’s the crucial thing with noise,” Andrew Smith, a psychologist at the University of Cardiff and a leading voice in noise research since the 1970s. “We adapt to living in noisy environments, but it only takes a slight change – a period of quiet – to find that very distracting. And I think there will be an adverse reaction to the return of noise – not just greater annoyance, but less efficiency at work, in education, in our sleep, as well as more chronic effects.”

Despite legislation governing noise levels in many countries around the world – the UK’s Noise Abatement Act, for example, is 60 years old this year – pre-Covid-19 city centre sound levels still regularly reached 90 decibels, according to a recent European Environment Agency study. That’s like hearing a hoover close up, and it’s way above the World Heath Organization’s recommendations.

"It’s change that’s the crucial thing with noise.....I think there will be an adverse reaction to the return of noise"

In the US, millions of people living in cities are estimated to be at risk of noise-induced hearing loss due to their daily exposure to noise around them, while 140 million Europeans are affected by long-term noise from traffic, railways, aircraft and industry that could be harmful to their health. Beyond damage to hearing, prolonged exposure to anything much above 50 decibels has been shown to have unwelcome, typically hidden effects – higher blood pressure and stress levels, double the risk of depression, and reduced mental performance.

A classic 1974 study by psychologist Arline Bronzaft, for example, showed how the reading scores of sixth-grade students on the side of a school building overlooking railway tracks were a year behind those on the other, quieter side of the building. In 2002 a University of Gavle study found that the reading comprehension skills of children who lived near an airport improved after the airport moved locations, while stress hormone levels fell – and how, in turn, the learning of children who now found themselves living by the new airport declined, and their stress levels rose.

Conversely, focusing on the positive effects of the absence of noise, silence has been shown to help the generation of new brain cells in mice. And that’s all concerning to the likes of Erica Walker, postdoctoral researcher at Boston University’s School of Public Health and founder of Noise and the City, a campaign organisation studying urban noise levels. Technology may help to reduce overall noisiness: from sound insulated building materials to rubberised asphalt that aim to reduce the noise that reverberates around urban areas; from the first flight of an electrically-powered commercial aircraft last December to the advent of electric cars; even the invention of a new vacuum-assisted airliner toilet that’s half as loud as standard commodes – sources of unwelcome sound are being dialled down.

Traffic is one of the major sources of sound pollution in our daily lives, but the pandemic has led to fewer cars on the road in many parts of the world. But, Walker argues, access to quiet is all too often a matter of income: it’s the poorer members of society who invariably live close to industrial centres and transport lines; the wealthier who can access the technology that may make their lives more peaceful, and have the money to enjoy so-called “quiet tourism”, also tend to be the people with the voice to complain about unwelcome noise.

Quiet areas tend to be more rapidly gentrified. Walker instead argues that access to quiet should be a human right. “I think when everything goes back to ‘normal’ there will have been this new precedent set – a benchmark of what quiet is possible, and a new perception of our soundscape,” she says, although she is uncertain that this will bring lasting change. “Most people know constant stimulus is not good for your health.

But then most authorities see noise as something that can only be mitigated by spending a lot of money. And the argument is always that noise is the product of activity that brings money to a community. The cost to quality of life is overlooked.” Antonella Radicchi, an architect and urban planner at the Technische Universität Berlin, agrees. She’s the creator of Hush City, a free app developed in 2017 initially for people in Berlin to map and share not just the noise levels of their favourite quiet spots in the city, but also audio, imagery and their own impressions; the app has since become available in four languages and over the coming year will be used in studies by the National University of Singapore and Limerick, Ireland. “In a world which only seems to be getting louder and more unjust, there should be a push for everyone to have access to quiet should they want quiet,” Radicchi argues. “Since the beginning of the 20th Century we’ve had movements aimed at reducing urban noise, and now we know it can be a health hazard. But we can’t reduce all sound to noise – because sound is fundamental to our experience of living in the world, to modulating our emotions, and because sound is also about politics. Quiet in our cities is not sufficiently pursued or protected.”

Will that change post-Covid-19? With rural flight seeing our cities ever more crowded, could noise pollution become the next big public health issue? Those who have been on the front-line of this campaign for years say it should be, but are wary of expecting too much.

One recent study found that 63% of protected natural areas in the US are now so blighted with human-generated noise that it has doubled the background sound levels in these areas, while a fifth have seen a 10-fold increase in noise. Across the border from the silence of Finland, Ulf Winther is the general secretary of Norwegian Association Against Noise, established in 1963. “I sometimes think that we’re just wasting our time,” he admits. “Noise is pollution, but unlike air pollution you can’t see it or smell it, it’s temporary, so it’s often a forgotten issue. For most people awareness of cost to the community is so low there’s little action against noise, relative to other problems. Reducing noise levels may be too much to ask for. Now it’s about stopping them from growing.”

For all that, the quiet of Covid-19 has perhaps revealed a new sensitivity to noise. According to the UK’s Noise Abatement Society, the diminishment of traffic noise has resulted in an increase in complaints about the neighbours we can now hear that much more clearly. “I think that demand for quiet goes hand in glove with demand for a simplicity – and that’s an idea shaping a lot of people’s thinking now,” says Gloria Elliot, the society’s chief executive. “I just hope we don’t all forget just how nice the lockdown quiet has been.”

by Jenni Russell

This article first appeared in the Times (21/5/20). Jenni Russell is a regular columnist on the paper.

One of the great compensations of lockdown is hearing less noise, at least of the external, ungovernable kind. One’s own children at home, quarrelling or competing, is another matter. At least one can shout back at them. Everywhere people are marvelling at hearing the complexity of birdsong, the peacefulness of streets with so little traffic, the pleasure of walking in parks without aircraft rumbling overhead.

The drop in noise is so marked that it has been picked up by the British Geological Survey as a dramatic fall in ground vibrations. The planet itself is quieter because we are. At the end of last month they reported that the noise generated by our daily lives at 100 measuring stations had dropped by between 20 and 50 per cent. The falls were greatest near railway stations, airports, big roads and construction sites. A seismometer near King’s Cross station in London recorded a 30 per cent fall; even Twickenham is down 25 per cent.

The same pattern is being seen across the world. Brussels’s noise has fallen by a third, and Germany’s car traffic is down by 50 per cent. This is a remarkable, temporary liberation from one of the greatest and least considered sources of stress in our lives.

Most of us are battered by noise every day but it is worst for those who live in towns and cities, or who travel to them. The imposition of noise and the level of it has risen sharply over the past 40 years. It is not just more planes, more cars, and more construction, but the rise of amplified sound in almost every private and public space, from the piped music in shops, bars and restaurants to the interminable, ear-splitting, repetitive announcements on buses and trains, the thudding from car radios, boom boxes or a passenger’s headphones, the inflicting of a neighbour’s party music at midnight on everyone a few hundred metres away. We feel impotent in the face of this onslaught.

Rising noise feels like an unavoidable fact of life, one that we care deeply about but cannot influence. More than a third of people dislike piped music; fewer than a third like it. This year the organisation Action on Hearing Loss found that 80 per cent had cut short their visits to a pub or restaurant because of noise. A 2014 survey found that in a typical year more residents complain to their local councils about noise than about any other issue. They are right to care. Noise is not something we should shrug off as an intrusion we must learn to live with or be more tolerant of. It is destructive both for our bodies and for our minds.

Our understanding of the damage it causes is accumulating with every new piece of research. In February Joshua Dean from the University of Chicago found that noise is an undetected performance killer, undermining the brain’s ability to focus. When the same task was given to 128 workmen to perform against different noise levels, a slight increase in noise, of just 10db — the equivalent of a vacuum cleaner rather than a dishwasher — reduced productivity by 5 per cent. The workers were quite unaware of this, as noise affected their cognition rather than their effort.

As Dean points out, there are several significant aspects to this. Companies are always desperate to push up productivity, which in Britain has scarcely risen in a decade. A 5 per cent difference in performance is dramatic. Just for context, British productivity has increased by a miserly 0.3 per cent a year for the past ten years, down from 2 per cent annually in the decade before.

The findings have implications for every job performed against high noise. Anyone who must take in multiple sources of information and focus, from a factory foreman to a traffic policeman, will function less well than they should. Our minds may try to accept noise; physiologically, our bodies cannot. It affects our hearts, blood pressure, our chances of stroke. Last autumn the European Heart Journal showed how long-term exposure to traffic and aircraft noise increases heart disease. A five-year study of 500 adults found that for every 5db increase in average noise over 24 hours, there was a 34 per cent increase in heart attacks and strokes. Brain imaging exposed the mechanism. Higher noise levels triggered activity in the amygdala, which processes stress and fear, and increased arterial inflammation.

Other studies have shown that even noise we are unaware of, heard during sleep, raises adrenaline and cortisol and disturbs our rest. In America, a 2018 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found higher rates of hypertension and high cholesterol in those exposed to loud noise at work. In a German study, people vexed by noise had a higher risk of having their hearts thrown out of rhythm by atrial fibrillation.

As a killer and a pollutant, noise has never grabbed public attention in the way climate change and environmental pollution have. Perhaps that’s because its effects are, paradoxically, silent and hard to see, except individually, in our racing hearts. The government officially considers noise “an inevitable consequence of a mature and vibrant society”. We all want jobs and prosperity but now that we have glimpsed the effects of greater peace this shouldn’t happen just as before. Let’s campaign for more bicycles, quieter road surfaces, lower speeds, fewer planes, minimal announcements, restrictions on the construction hours the government has just, mistakenly, extended. It’s what our hearts and minds not only want but cannot flourish without.